twitter - Otherwise Occupied

If you're a proponent of ubiquitous, open communication, it can be embarrassing to admit that you don't see much benefit in Twitter. However, it's not hard to note that most of the big Twitter advocates are people who sit around and blog all day. Who else can possibly devote the time to watching a stream of messages scrolling in some window or popping up or hitting your mobile phone all day long? I've already got personal email, school email, work email, blogs, discussion forums, and random web sites to read (not every web site I'm interested in provides me a feed to make tracking easier.)

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch is right on when he declares that Web 3.0 Will Be About Reducing the Noise—And Twhirl Isn’t Helping. More correctly, I'd argue that Web 3.0 must be about reducing noise. Most people can't tolerate the noise level that exists with all of the blogs out there. (Go ask a "regular" user about what feed reader they use. Hehe.)

Here's where I think Erick really got to the crux of the matter:

But if you think it is hard enough to keep up with e-mails and instant messages, keeping up with the Web (even your little slice of it) is much worse. Putting Twhirl on your desktop and hearing the constant “ding” of new messages coming in will make you realize that this is IM on steroids. (You will quickly turned off the sound).
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I need less data, not more data. I need to know what is important, and I don’t have time to sift through thousands of Tweets and Friendfeed messages and blog posts and emails and IMs a day to find the five things that I really need to know. People like Mike and Robert can do that, but they are weird, and even they have their limits.

Yes! Show me the information I want, not all the information that might be out there in my world. The current situation is like abusive discovery. "They want documents? Oh, we'll give them documents!" No, no. Relevant information that may lead to admissible evidence.

There may be useful nuggets that come across Twitter, but unless one is doing little more than sitting around looking to be the first to blog on a topic, I can't imagine there's enough useful when broadly following to make it worth the distraction. Until something changes, I'm going to be in Erick's camp.